The codex

The usual form of book in late antiquity and in the middle ages was the codex, which consisted of simple sheets of papyrus or parchment folded once and sewn together to form quires or gatherings. In origin it was an imitation of wax tablet diptychs and it had a predecessor in the parchment notebook. Martial is the first writer to mention a parchment codex format for a literary work, but he himself clearly preferred the papyrus roll. The terms ‘liber’, ‘volumen’, and ‘tomus’, originally used to designate the papyrus roll, were transferred to the codex after it had become the almost exclusive form of book.

As early as the second century AD, Egyptian Christians were imitating the papyrus codex by making parchment codices, which allowed a more economical use of the writing material than the roll. The size of the gathering varied widely in these first papyrus books, ranging from one bifolium to fifty or more leaves, so that a whole book (such as a gospel) might comprise one gathering. In the age of parchment, this arrangement was still imitated in Irish pocket-gospels of the eighth century, for example in the Codex Bonifatianus 3 at Fulda.

In continental book production, from antiquity until the early middle ages, a regular parchment gathering normally consisted of four double leaves (quaternio). In contrast, the gatherings in most Irish and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts consist of five double leaves (quinio, Old Irish cín, Anglo-Saxon cine). This practice may also have been in imitation of a Roman model, as it is found, for instance, in the Bembine Terence. In the later middle ages the number of parchment or paper sheets in a gathering increases.